Landowner Joseph E. Segar never wavered in his loyalty to the federal cause, not only turning his Strawberry Banks property over for a bustling Union army camp but also serving as a member of Virginia's loyalist shadow government.

Elizabeth City County planter and slave-owner Charles K. Mallory supported the Union, too — at least until a party of bluecoats from Fort Monroe crossed the Queen Street bridge on May 23, 1861, and attempted to disrupt the town's vote on secession.

After they withdrew, the angry crowd reassembled, then expressed its outrage over this abolitionist-inspired bullying by voting 360 to 6 against the Union.

Less than three weeks later, many of these Hampton and county men would meet federal troops again, defeating them decisively at Big Bethel Church in the first land battle of the war. A month after that a mounted force of mostly local men would steal into town at night, sneak past the headstones of their ancestors in St. John's Church and burn some 500 buildings to the ground.

"Hampton was devastated. Hampton was erased. Everything was gone," says Hampton History Museum curator J. Michael Cobb, describing the loss of a colonial and Federal-period town bigger than Colonial Williamsburg.

"The burning of Hampton set a benchmark for the destruction that was to come — and the images of its remains look like Berlin after World War II."

The fiery death of Hampton made national news, sparking lurid reports in both of the North's major illustrated weeklies and its big metropolitan dailies. Southerners countered by praising the heroism of their grim sacrifice — and the need to keep the indefensible town out of the hands of both the enemy and the rapidly growing number of escaped slaves.

Within days, however, the charred ruins had become an indispensable salvage yard for Union soldiers and escaped "contraband slaves" alike as they built and furnished new quarters. The pickings ranged from bricks, doors and shutters to books and furniture as well as a grand piano, Cobb says.

On the untouched east side of the Hampton River, moreover, the Chesapeake Female Seminary survived to become the core of a giant Union hospital that housed more than 3,000 wounded soldiers in the summer of 1864 alone.

Impregnable Fort Monroe became a crucial bastion of federal might, not only serving as the springboard for the Union's 1862 march up the Peninsula but also the massive naval expeditions that captured New Orleans and vital parts of the Carolinas.

"The burning of Hampton was a symbolic act — a demonstration of the people's misguided defiance and the willingness to sacrifice their own homes," historian Ed Longacre says.

"But it didn't have any strategic value. It didn't accomplish much in the long term — and it probably wouldn't have happened later in the war – after people began to see the real impact of its destruction."

NAVAL STATION NORFOLK — The Navy on Saturday commissioned the USS John Warner, adding a 12th Virginia-class submarine to the fleet and celebrating the legacy of its namesake, the retired senator who was hailed as a statesman.